This project was designed to investigate the question of literary authority in the United States during the period 1940-2000. By constructing and then analyzing three cohorts -- 1940, 1955, and 1970 -- of U.S. prose-fiction debut writers we aimed at drawing conclusions about the social authority that attached to literary authority in this period. We wanted to contribute to U.S. literary history a new perspective which drew on Pierre Bourdieu's field model and to lay the empirical basis for further analysis of the role of gender, class, race, ethnicity, and age in the development of the literary field during this period. Moreover, we wanted to give the literary analysis of U.S. prose fiction in the "American Century" a new direction. At present, ten months after the last activities of project members funded by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation, we have published a number of articles that deliver some of the many results from this study, we have a vast amount of data on the three cohorts and built up a data set for further use, and we are well on the way towards a full documentation of the analysis. Our data set is a rich and unique resource for studying authorial careers, and the geometric data analyses of what we call "the spaces of the debut" and "the spaces of fictional worlds" constitute a new type of investigation of authors in U.S. literary studies. We hope that the data collected will be useful for further projects in American literature in Sweden and abroad, as well as being a useful resource for advanced and undegraduate projects.